Enter the New Spac --a Secret Garden : Gorgeous new wing of rebuilt city library opens Sunday

Los Angeles, whose architecture is, notoriously, private rather than public, is for that reason a difficult city to visit but often a surprisingly easy one to live in. And secret space, the dominant motif of our private architecture, is the secret theme as well of our public architecture. L.A.’s largest public space, the Hollywood Bowl, hides in a valley. No idle passerby could guess the spectacle that lies just out of view.

So it is also with the splendid new public space that opens its doors to the public this Sunday. No pedestrian casually passing the modest, balanced but deliberately understated Tom Bradley Wing of the reopened Los Angeles Central Library could guess that this four-story building at the corner of Fifth and Grand conceals a half-submerged, eight-story atrium, an enclosed space rivaled in Los Angeles only by Union Station for sheer, breathtaking immensity.

In springing this surprise, architect Norman Pfeiffer is the heir and ally of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, who designed and built the pyramid-topped Central Library building in 1926. That arson-damaged building, now restored to its original loveliness, includes a rotunda whose most remarkable feature is that it is completely invisible from the street. Goodhue wanted his building to be topped by a dome. The city fathers wanted something more in the chic Art Moderne manner of the 1920s. To please them, Goodhue encased his dome in walls and topped it with a pyramidal attic. Originally, pedestrians were to enter the rotunda, whose floor is one story above ground, at floor level from a pedestrian bridge linking it to Bunker Hill. After Goodhue’s death, that bridge was deleted from the plan, further concealing the rotunda’s initial (and intended) effect but further enhancing its secret, delayed effect.

Pfeiffer’s initial plan for an eight-story structure was also rejected when the city insisted on a building that would not dwarf Goodhue’s. But responding as Goodhue himself might have, Pfeiffer chose to sink his building up to its waist in the ground. The result: His atrium, a deep, narrow slice of the approximately cube-shaped building, surprises the visitor just as Goodhue’s rotunda does.

The fact that a pyramid with the eye of knowledge graces the U.S. dollar is proof sufficient that geometry (the conic section, the sphere within the cube, etc.) has always stood for knowledge itself in the American iconographic tradition. Secret knowledge, hidden like the chambers of the original Egyptian pyramids, is among the allusions of a building whose style has rightly been called Egyptian Revival as well as Art Moderne. All of this, not excluding the slight eccentricity of it, makes Goodhue’s building and Pfeiffer’s new wing utterly right for a library and, above all, for a library in Los Angeles.

Arson, earthquake, riot and public penury all conspired to stop this opening. But the determination of, quite literally, thousands, beginning with the many hundreds of volunteers who rescued the books themselves seven years ago, has prevailed. Central Library Director Elizabeth Gay Teoman, chief among those who would not give up, will now preside over the true hidden wonder of the Tom Bradley Wing, the state-of-the-art library technology that will make this opening an opening for the entire region and indeed the entire nation. A city of many secrets now has a new one to share.